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A weaned harbor seal pup was resting onshore when an untagged male sea otter approached it, grasped it with its teeth and forepaws, bit it on the nose, and flipped it over. The harbor seal moved toward the water with the sea otter following closely. Once in the water, the sea otter gripped the harbor seal’s head with its forepaws and repeatedly bit it on the nose, causing a deep laceration. The sea otter and pup rolled violently in the water for approximately 15 min, while the pup struggled to free itself from the sea otter’s grasp. Finally, the sea otter positioned itself dorsal to the pup’s smaller body while grasping it by the head and holding it underwater in a position typical of mating sea otters. As the sea otter thrust his pelvis, his penis was extruded and intromission was observed. At 105 min into the encounter, the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming. Thanks Jasmine.

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Matt Taibbi’s most recent Rolling Stonearticle unpacks one of last year’s most shocking bank cases in our era of “Too Big to Jail.” In December, HSBC was punished with a $1.9 billion settlement on drug laundering charges, the largest in American history, yet only five weeks worth of profits for the world’s third largest bank. U.S. Assistant Attorney Lanny Breuer was uncharacteristically candid when explaining why he refused to pursue criminal charges: “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.” People were rightfully outraged when not a single HSBC banker went to jail for a decades’ worth of federal crimes, including money-laundering linked to drug cartels, terrorists and oppressive regimes. Taibbi dove deep into HSBC’s case and history, revealing that the bank’s crimes were even worst than we thought.

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An SS officer strode over and established they were all siblings from the Ovitz family. Immediately, the order went out: Wake the doctor! It was nearly midnight on Friday, May 19, 1944, and Dr Josef Mengele was asleep in his quarters. All the troopers on duty, however, were well aware of his passion for collecting human ‘freaks’, including hermaphrodites and giants. A lone dwarf wouldn’t have been sufficient reason to disturb his sleep, but a family — and seven of them — why, it was just like the fairy tale!

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Social media addiction has become an official condition. A clinic in London is treating more than 100 sufferers a year, with a professional footballer among those receiving counseling. A study last year by the University of Chicago suggested sites like Facebook are more addictive that alcohol and cigarettes.

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We’ve noted many times that when it comes to corporate media coverage of the so-called budget “sequester”–the immediate cuts to military and social spending set to hit in a matter of weeks–what matters most is what will happen to the military. The Washington Post had a whole piece (2/13/13) devoted to yet another round of complaints from military leaders–without a single comment from anyone who might take the view that cutting military spending would not be such a disaster.

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At around midday on Tuesday, the couple arrived to clean the house and found Dorner in an upstairs sitting room. His gun drawn, the suspect ordered them to stay calm. Mrs Reynolds ran down the stairs in a bid to escape, but Dorner caught her. He took the couple to a bedroom, where he made them lie on the floor, then bound their limbs with plastic zip-locks, gagged them with towels and covered their heads with pillowcases. “I thought we were dead,” Mr Reynolds said. The gunman repeatedly insisted, however, that he would not kill them. He revealed he had watched Mr Reynolds shovelling snow around the property in the preceding days, and told the couple he believed they were “hard-working, good people,” saying: “I don’t have a problem with you. I just want to clear my name.”

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Parent says West Sabine staff out of line after feces found

“My kid came home and he said, he told me that he had been inspected, his butt had been inspected at the elementary school for feces,” Little said. “And I asked him, I got to ask him about it and he said he was embarrassed by the whole situation.” Feces had been found on the gym floor at least five times during or after PE Class. It first happened last year only with this particular class of children, said principal Deborah Lane. Lane says she asked the children numerous times who was responsible. She even gave them lectures on germs and the dangers of e-coli. This last time, she requested the school nurse search for feces in the Tiger cubs’ pants. Accounts of how the search was conducted differ. “The school nurse basically pulled their pants out or down.”

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Facebook didn’t pay any federal or state income taxes last year and will receive a hefty tax refund, according to a recent report. How did the social network manage to swing such a nice tax break? Well, according to the Citizen for Tax Justice report the company benefited from the tax deductability of executive stock options, which reduced all of its income taxes by $1.03 billion in 2012. The company also has another $2.17 billion in extra tax-option breaks to carry forward in the future, according to the report, which means Facebook gets to deduct a total of more than $3 billion in current and future taxes, according to the report.

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One reason is that a freshly discovered weakness in a popular piece of software, known in the trade as a “zero-day” vulnerability because the software makers have had no time to develop a fix, can be cashed in for much more than a reputation boost and some free drinks at the bar. Information about such flaws can command prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from defense contractors, security agencies and governments. This trade in zero-day exploits is poorly documented, but it is perhaps the most visible part of a new industry that in the years to come is likely to swallow growing portions of the U.S. national defense budget, reshape international relations, and perhaps make the Web less safe for everyone. Zero-day exploits are valuable because they can be used to sneak software onto a computer system without detection by conventional computer security measures, such as antivirus packages or firewalls. Criminals might do that to intercept credit card numbers. An intellige…

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On a scale of one to 10, you probably think you’re a seven. And you wouldn’t be alone. While it’s impossible for most people to be above the median for a specific quality, people think they are better than most people in many arenas, from charitable behavior to work performance. The phenomenon, known as illusory superiority, is so stubbornly persistent that psychologists would be surprised if it didn’t show up in their studies, said David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell who has studied the effect for decades. It happens for many reasons: Others are too polite to say what they really think, incompetent people lack the skills to assess their abilities accurately, and such self-delusions can actually protect people’s mental health, Dunning told LiveScience. Since psychological studies first began, people have given themselves top marks for most positive traits. While most people do well at assessing others, they are wildly positive about their own abilities, Dunning said.

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When the woman Tiffany Stanton Johnson, 25, arrived home and spoke to an officer on the scene, she stated that she had left her three children home alone to go shopping at Kmart. While speaking to the woman, the officer allegedly saw her son behind her playing with a crack rock, according to the complaint. At this, Johnson was forced to admit that she sells crack cocaine. After giving a consent search, the officer found a can with 12 grams of crack cocaine packaged for sale.

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“A funny comparison is if you take the biggest ungulate herd — so that would be bison, antelope, deer and elk — in Yellow Stone National Park, per meter squared — so per unit area — the fish on one of the reefs that I look at…they actually pee more than three times more [than that herd],” he said. Fish urine even dwarfs fertilizer-heavy golf course runoff — per meter squared — in nutrient content. Luke Joseph, a freshman biology major from Augusta, said he wouldn’t have guessed fish pee had so much to do with nutrient cycling. “That’s pretty cool,” he said. “I guess that means aquaponics might be a good way to grow things.”

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Turk appears in a YouTube video by White Trash Clan titled “My World is Blue” dancing in a blue tutu and fairy wings and carrying a wand. She blows pixie dust at the camera and mimes drug use. The video, posted in July 2012, shows people dancing in parking lots and pharmacies with giant cutouts of blue pills and rhapsodizing about prescription drug abuse: “I can stop when I want to / I’m not addicted / I don’t take pills / crush and sniff it / Blue is my world in this life how I live it / Come out to Staten Island, pay a little visit.”

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If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something pleasurable, it’s forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters, it gives instant appeal to listless reporting and gives editors an excuse to drop some booty on the science pages. There are too many bad examples to mention in detail, but I have some favourites. The Sun declared that “cupcakes could be as addictive as cocaine” because they apparently cause “a surge of the reward chemical dopamine to hit the decision-making area of the brain”. The article was topped off with a picture of Katy Perry, apparently a “cupcake fan” and, presumably, dangerously close to spiralling into a life of frosted-sponge addiction.

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The government is considering introducing internet filters, such as those used to block China off form the worldwide web, in order to stop Icelanders downloading or viewing pornography on the internet. The unprecedented censorship is justified by fears about damaging effects of the internet on children and women. Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland’s interior minister, is drafting legislation to stop the access of online pornographic images and videos by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones. “We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime,” he said.

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Miss Sanborn tells us that an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.

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Russian Meteorite Pictures & Video

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Since sex usually occurs in water, it doesn’t tend to preserve well. But in one four-hundred-million-year-old silica-rich deposit local changes in pH remobilized some of the silica, leaving behind thin films of the original organic material. In the specimen the chert beautifully preserved the plant’s delicate archegonium (from goni, Hindi for ‘sack,’ akin to yoni, Sanskrit for ‘vagina’) — the female sex organ. Another sample of rock, sliced thin and observed with a microscope, shows Aglaphyton’s antheridium, its male sex organ — filled with sperm cells ready to explode. Here, preserved by chance, with neither compromised actors nor moral qualm, is a geographic equivalent of the ‘money shot’ of pornographic films — an ejaculation event 140,000 times older than Homer’s Odyssey, 400 times older than the human species, and almost as old as the appearance of animals in the fossil record.

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Does this make you wonder how much footage from prominent world events is actually digitally created to assist in advancing a dark agenda? How much fake news are we being fed? Dictators, terrorists, riots, revolution beamed into our living rooms as part of on-going psychological warfare against the masses? Is this a conventional war of tanks and guns and bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or is it really all part of a sustained psychological war on the minds of every single person on the planet who watches television? Our advise? Stop watching mass media news. There’s nothing good for us there!

I’m proud to present my latest creation: The Hammer! The Hammer is a prototype test-your-strength game that’s an insertable, muscle-controlled, light-up dildo.

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We asked the 61% of Facebook users who have taken a break from using the site to tell us in their own words why they did so, and they mentioned a variety of reasons. The largest group (21%) said that their “Facebook vacation” was a result of being too busy with other demands or not having time to spend on the site. Others pointed toward a general lack of interest in the site itself (10% mentioned this in one way or another), an absence of compelling content (10%), excessive gossip or “drama” from their friends (9%), or concerns that they were spending too much time on the site and needed to take a break (8%).

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Learn why your favorite social network – Facebook – is actually bad. All the political and technical reasons you need to understand why you should consider deleting your Facebook account and how to do it.

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Facebook has shown no respect for its users privacy. The site notoriously makes it difficult to understand who you are sharing what with, and has been known to reset privacy settings to defaults without notifying users. Defaults which share everything. Facebook tracks your usage of the web and knows pretty much everything else about your life. Facebook supports CISPA, and why wouldn’t they? It gives them a free pass to give your data to anyone. SOPA and PIPA didn’t. A service that knows everything about you, even things you don’t want it to, supports legislation that would allow it to give anyone that information without recourse – sounds great doesn’t it?

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“This lawsuit is about preserving the integrity and legacy of a man who has spent years working hard at his musical craft and has earned the position of one of the greatest musical entertainers of all time,” said Gary. “We cannot sit idly and watch as technology giants or anyone else exploits the name or likeness of an innocent person with the goal of making millions of dollars,” he added. “The defendants have marketed Chubby Checker’s name on their product to gain a profit and this just isn’t right.” The “Chubby Checker” app, which appears on websites for Palm devices, claims to allow a person to determine a man’s penis size by using his shoe size.

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“I think my neighbors on their way to church see the buckets and stuff and think we’ve got a meth lab operation going on here. I just want to put their minds at ease, and let them know it’s maple syrup. And that they’re all welcome for pancakes if they want to come on over.”

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. A woman tending to her husband in the middle of the night by Jan Saenredam, 1595 Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

✖ The Internet Blames Obama for the Death of Andrew Breitbart

Before 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, The New York Times’ assistant managing editor, Jim Roberts, tweeted what was perhaps the first accusation that hinted at Barack Obama’s involvement. “Only a few weeks ago, #Breitbart spoke to CPAC, claiming to have videos of Obama from ‘college days,’” wrote Roberts. Sure enough, only weeks earlier Breibart, never one to hold back against the president, told an audience at the Washington, DC Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that he was close to leaking videos that would end the political career of the commander-in-chief. “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart told an audience of attendees last month. “We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”

Psychedelic substances have long been used for healing, ceremonial, or mind-altering subjective experiences due to compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, generate hallucinations, perceptual distortions, or altered states of awareness. Of these, the psychedelic substance psilocybin, the prodrug (a precursor of a drug that must in vivo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent) of psilocin (4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine) and the key hallucinogen found in so-called magic mushrooms, is widely used not only in healing ceremonies, but, more recently, in psychotherapy as well – but little has been known about its specific activity in the brain.

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government. The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

✖ ‘Plume-Gate’ Shocker: Media Silence Raises Troubling Questions

The executive branch and multiple federal agencies, agencies tasked with keeping the American public safe, did their best to hide and to cover-up information about a deadly radioactive plume and ensuing fallout that was headed for the West Coast of the United States from Japan. The fact it was real and did arrive is proven by samplings from milk, vegetables and rainwater. Even though EPA testing methodology and actual capability were questioned, independent sources verified the fallout. To those who say radiation does not travel in a plume or that fallout is a local phenomenon, there is an excellent distillation of the book ‘Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment’ at GlobalResearch.ca that proves otherwise. The evidence obtained in the FOIA request indicates that right from the start, the NRC had a clear idea of the significance of the disaster that was unfolding, but concealed the truth from the American public.

Last month TfL applied to issue anti-social behaviour orders which would not only stop them undertaking further expeditions and blogging about urban exploration but also prohibit them from carrying equipment that could be used for exploring after dark. Extraordinarily, it also stipulates they should not be allowed to speak to each other for the duration of the order – 10 years. “To me, telling people they can’t associate with their closest friends is an incredible invasion of human rights,” says Garrett. “It’s a complete overreaction and an amazing tack to take after the group already agreed to a caution.” He thinks TfL’s legal action is fuelled by a wider misunderstanding of what urban exploration is about. “What we do is very benign,” he says. “The motivation for it comes from a love for the city – we want to interact with its hidden histories and forgotten stories and places.”

At 20.6 millimetres long, the 165-million-year old fossils dwarf the largest living flea – a 12 mm species which plagues the mountain beaver of North America. The fossil beasts are so large they may have lived on feathered dinosaurs rather than the small mammals that scuttled across the Mesozoic landscape, according to André Nel at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, a member of the team that made the find

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

A Philadelphia woman was arrested Wednesday at a so-called “pumping party,” where police say she was planning to administer buttock-enhancing injections. Police say they received a tip that Padge Windslowe, also known as “Black Madam,” would be performing the procedure at a Germantown home. This wasn’t the first time the “Black Madam” was connected to illegal buttock enhancements. Windslowe is under investigation for a botched butt-enhancement procedure on 20-year-old British student Claudia Aderotimi at the Hampton Inn near Philadelphia International Airport in February 2011, according to police. Aderotimi died after the procedure was performed.

Ronald Reagan once famously declared that inflation is a tax, but sadly most Americans did not really grasp what he was talking about. If the American people truly understood what inflation was doing to them, they would be screaming bloody murder about monetary policy. Inflation is an especially insidious tax because it is not just a tax on your income for one year. It is a continual tax on every single dollar that you own. As your money sits in the bank, it is constantly losing value. Over time, the effects of inflation can be absolutely devastating. For example, if you put 100 dollars in the bank in 1970, those same dollars today would only have about 17 percent of the purchasing power that they did back then. In essence, you were hit by an 83 percent “inflation tax” and all you did was leave your money in the bank. So who is responsible for this? Well, the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy in the United States…

China usually holds its military hand very close to the vest–that, or things “mysteriously” leak that it doesn’t (does) want the world to know about–so we’re left to wonder why the People’s Republic has decided to publish this in the journal Advanced Materials Research. Nonetheless, it’s pretty interesting. Chinese navy researchers have plans for a new submarine hunting scheme that uses ship-launched UAVs running genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms narrow down a range of possibilities to an optimal solution much the way evolution does (at least in a simplified sense)–by weeding out the weaker offspring and mating the best with the best to create stronger candidates. These algorithms would take into account things like fuel economy, potential air and sea threats, and oceanographic geography to zero in on the most likely places for submarines to be moving at a given time.

Either intimidated into leaving or arrested… Either way he couldn’t File a Police Complaint

In addition to monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Meetup and Occupy live video feeds, the feds also relied on the left-leaning activist website Daily Kos for tracking protest locations. “The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence,” the report notes in its final paragraph. “While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters.” Hastings warned that there were “ominous” implications to this kind of information gathering.

The results of the shortage or lack of insurance coverage for generic Adderall XR forced many people to seek out name-brand Adderall XR, which, in turn, ran out. Then people, desperate for any ADHD medication, sought out the generic instant release amphetamine salts (formally Adderall). The increased demand on instant release dried up the supplies pretty quickly, and soon ADHD sufferers everywhere were unable to find any form of their medication. Luckily, Shire had magically possessed enough amphetamines from their DEA quota to produce plenty of their new ADHD medication, Vyvanse. In fact, Shire doubled its third quarter profits from 2010 to 2011, with most of that increase resulting from Vyvanse sales. During this time, coinciding nicely with the Adderall shortage, Shire hiked the price of Vyvanse.

The group’s reputation among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners is poor; they are considered a punchline more often than a source of valuable information or insight. As a former recipient of their “INTEL REPORTS” (I assume someone at Stratfor signed me up for a trial subscription, which appeared in my inbox unsolicited), what I found was typically some combination of publicly available information and bland “analysis” that had already appeared in the previous day’s New York Times. A friend who works in intelligence once joked that Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive. As of 2001, a Stratfor subscription could cost up to $40,000 per year.

As Facebook gets ready to go public, the eyes of the world will become even more focused on the Menlo Park-based social network. That’s just partly why Friday’s report of an insurance advertisement on Facebook featuring the face of 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta is not the type of publicity the site wants ahead of its initial public offering.

They meet every Saturday night on the second floor of a house, above a paint store. The services are a mix of traditional mass and metal that has biblical themes. The rosaries are made from chains and the bibles lined with denim. As the music reaches a crescendo, praises of the Lord are sung. Cristian asserts, “If Jesus were alive today, he would be neither a guerilla nor a metalhead. He would accept everyone without distinction and without reproach to anyone.” Can’t really argue with that!

Laughing tourists were either cynical or confused about whether a man was really suffering a medical episode amid the “doctor,” “nurses” and health warnings at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, a restaurant owner said Wednesday. “It was no joke,” said Jon Basso, who promotes himself “Doctor Jon,” his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses and customers as patients. Basso said he could tell right away the man in his 40s eating a Triple Bypass burger was having trouble. He was sweating, shaking and could barely talk.

Scientists have discovered four new species of primitive eyeless insects, one of which they described as the deepest land animal ever found. These animals are springtails (Arthropoda, Insecta, Collembola), a minute primitive wingless insect with six-legs and without eyes that commonly live in total darkness in caves, where they feed on fungi and decomposing organic matter. Described by Rafael Jordana and Enrique Baquero from University of Navarra (Spain), they are known for science as: Anurida stereoodorata, Deuteraphorura kruberaensis, Schaefferia profundissima and Plutomurus ortobalaganensis. The last one is the deepest arthropod ever found, at the remarkable depth of 1.980 meters (2,165 yards) below ground surface. The insects were collected during the Ibero-Russian CaveX team expedition to the world’s deepest known cave during the summer of 2010.

Namely, female nipples or even the impressions of nipples under clothing are unacceptable to Facebook censors, whereas male nipples are fine. Images of breast feeding, too, are forbidden if they show an exposed nipple. “Crushed heads” and mutilated limbs are also fine, so long as the person posting such images does not express delight and no internal organs are visible. The list specifically says that on this point, no exceptions would be made for news media. Also verboten: images of bodily fluids, including ear wax and pus; dead animals; advocacy of violence; advocacy of eating disorders; racial jokes where “the humor is not evident”; and “any photoshopped images of people, whether negative, positive or neutral”; “pixelated or black-barred content showing nudity or sexual activity”; “digital/cartoon nudity”; and images of drunk or sleeping people with “things drawn on their faces.”

In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone — rather it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney — will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech would be a federal offense, but those occurrences covered as special event of national significance don’t just stop there, either. And neither does the list of covered persons that receive protection.

But the line between mockery and hysteria may prove very thin, indeed, with one report at Consternation Security positing that, in the wake events such as the Iranian army overriding and capturing an RQ-170 drone, Anonymous might be able to hijack the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. It is with HAARP, Consternation claims to report seriously under a shimmering photo of an aurora, that hackers could, after inciting bouts of “headaches, dizziness, confusion, and even insanity,” “quite literally cook the President while he sleeps.”

Last summer, punk rock icon Jello Biafra and his band decided to cancel a show they had planned on playing at the Barby Club in Tel Aviv. At the time, Biafra wrote that ‘the toll and stress on the band members and myself has been huge, both logistically and as a matter of conscience’. In August, Biafra decided to travel to Israel and Palestine himself to explore his thoughts on the cultural boycott of Israel.

An extended campaign in Nevada by Google has led to a new host of provisions which will allow automated cars to legally drive in the state. Starting March 1st, 2012 innovators like Google can officially apply for a new kind of robot driver’s license that will give them permission to openly test their cars on the road. Automated vehicles will be able to travel the same streets and highways as human drivers, with only a red license plate marking them as robots. Once research on those automated cars is complete (which may take years), the Nevada Department of Motorized Vehicles will issue them a neon green license plate – an indication that the robot drivers are good to go.

Shocking photos of accused pedophile Mark Berndt offer a glimpse into his disturbing behavior at scandal-rocked Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles. In the newly-surfaced pictures, the 61-year-old is seen wearing a bizarre costume clearly geared to the Disney set. He sports Mickey Mouse ears, a form-fitting black shirt and tiny baby-blue satin running shorts over black tights, with an arm draped around a little girl dressed as a fairytale princess. Berndt completes his over-the-top child-like appearance with a half-eaten cupcake in his hand and green frosting smeared on his mustache. The 61-year-old teacher faces multiple life sentences. He currently has been charged with 23 counts of lewd acts on children. Police say Berndt blindfolded students, taped their mouths and photographed them with a cockroach crawling on their faces. He is also accused of conducting “tasting games” in which he fed students semen from a spoon and cookies laced with the same bodily fluid.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has a message for everyone who thinks the drug war is bad: you’re wrong, it’s awesome. (Reuters) – Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano defended Washington’s drug war strategy on Monday despite calls by some Latin American leaders to consider decriminalizing narcotics. … “I would not agree with the premise that the drug war is a failure,” Napolitano said. “It is a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs.”

Now here’s something you don’t often hear about. Two warehouses containing iPhone branded gas stoves got seized by the state police at Wuhan, after discovering they are not real Apple products

Russian Cossacks are to stand guard over Moscow’s Orthodox churches after a feminist punk band broke into a Cathedral and sang blasphemous songs at the altar. ­Earlier this month, four members of the all-girl band Pussy Riot rushed the church dressed in mini-dresses and wearing masks. Without losing time, they sang a song entitled Holy S**t before being escorted out by security. The girls are notorious for their publicity stunts. They’ve performed a song on Red Square addressed to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Now the Cossack say, “Let’s protect the holy shrines!”, promising to create vigilante groups to protect a number of churches in the Russian capital.

“As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer,” Fukuyama recalled in the report. After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country. However, investigators concluded the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. “They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident,” lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News. It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn’t stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been paying a defense contractor $11.4 million to monitor social media websites and other Internet communications to find criticisms of the department’s policies and actions. A government watchdog organization, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), obtained hundreds of documents from DHS through the Freedom of Information Act and found details of the arrangement with General Dynamics. The company was contracted to monitor the Web for “reports that reflect adversely on DHS,” including sub-agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This Stossel special will blow your mind! The government, especially the EPA is out of control as well as local prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves.

“This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the Internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity,” said Interpol’s acting director of police services. However, it was not clear what evidence there was to prove those arrested were part of Anonymous, an extremely loose-knit international movement of online activists, or “hacktivists.” Spanish police said earlier they had arrested four suspected hackers accused of sabotaging websites and publishing confidential data on the Internet. They were accused of hacking political parties’ and companies’ websites and adding fangs to the faces of leaders in photographs online, and publishing data identifying top officials’ security guards, Spanish police said.

It is time — now, not next year — to de-occupy Walmart. And Archer Daniels Midland. And Tyson Foods. And Monsanto. And Cargill. And Kraft Foods. And the other large corporations that decide what ends up on our plates. Take all our money out, public and personal, from our shopping dollars to school district lunch contracts to the corporate subsidies that uphold these firms’ grip on our food supply, and invest it in a new system that’s economically diverse and ecologically sustainable. These corporations’ stranglehold over food has wreaked havoc on the environment, our health, farmers, workers, and our very future. It is time for an end to Big Food, and a societal shift to something radically different. We all deserve a future where what we eat feeds community and land, instead of eroding soils, polluting water and air, and tossing away small farmers and immigrant workers as if they were balance sheet losers.

While we’ve seen plenty of crazy boombox bikes in our day, this bicycle by Dutch designers Merel Sloother, Liat Azulay and Pieter Frank de Jong, takes that idea one step further into the past. A prototype of their Feats per Minute project, this retro-inspired ride allows riders to play records as they travel throughout the city. We’re assuming that pedaling faster will speed up the music — which could prove problematic unless you’re going for a leisurely ride or enjoy listening to chipmunks squeak — but we’re in love the concept, as long as no one comes riding down our street too early on the weekend.

Is this a freak occurrence? NO! It is a very common occurrence. It is a well-known error. One person has had to file over 100 disputes for mistaken bird sounds. For some reason Google is reluctant to fix this so companies like rumblefish take advantage of it to gain fraudulent income (google makes something also).

Today the gambling website OnlineGamblingPal.com dropped $10,871 for a sample of entombed pop star Michael Jackson’s old hair. Why so much? Because that’s the going market rate for the amount of Michael Jackson hair you see in the photo. Also, they saw the hairball’s potential—as a roulette ball.

Christmas season is a time of warmth and love, especially if it concerns two leathermen engaging in sweaty doggie-style buttsex. At least that’s the thinking among people who enjoy X-rated Christmas-tree ornaments, and we can only assume those people don’t have a lot of little nephews and nieces over for egg nog. Here are ten of the more, ummm, striking ornament possibilities out there. The first one is safe for work; after that you’re on your own.

Google is rolling out a feature that lets members of its online social network automatically find themselves in photos posted by friends. The “Find My Face” feature being added to Google+ over the next several days is opt-in only, meaning people have to make a point to turn it on. By leaving it to Google+ members to activate the feature, the Internet giant was sidestepping privacy concerns raised when social networking rival Facebook added facial recognition in an opt-out style this year.

In the future, a person may be able to watch a computer screen and have his or her brain patterns modified to improve physical or mental performance. Researchers say an innovative learning method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging could modify brain activities to help people recuperate from an accident or disease, learn a new language or even fly a plane.

As if bedbugs weren’t gross enough already, entomologists have now found that they get ahead by mating with their own mothers, brothers, sisters and fathers. By inbreeding, a single pregnant female can start the infestation of an entire building on her own. Parent-sibling matings and sibling-sibling matings are rare in the animal kingdom. So this study reveals an exception to the anti-inbreeding rule. But I’m drawn to the report for a pettier reason. As far as I’m concerned, DNA evidence has trumped the words of my landlord and a New York City housing inspector.

The immediate and obvious questions were these: 1) Why didn’t we try to recover the drone? 2) In lieu of a rescue effort why didn’t we bomb it into oblivion? Apparently there was third option and Onama struk that down also. THE ANSWERS WILL SHOCK YOU – or maybe not. Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that apparently the Pentagon pleaded with Barrack Hussein Obama to give the order to do just that. The Pentagon initially wanted to send a special forces team to recover the drone. Obama shot down that suggestion. Then the Pentagon offered up plan B , blow it to kingdom come. Obama refused that too and now Iran and China have a brand spanking new fully functional top secret US RQ 170 Sentinel Drone. The Drone was not recovered or destroyed specifically per Obama’s orders

Almost no one likes being in airports these days, but some people believe that one airport in particular — the Denver International Airport — is not only a hassle but also tied to conspiracies about the collapse of Western civilization. Some say there’s a top-secret underground bunker for the world’s elite to survive a nuclear war (or the impending Mayan 2012 apocalypse). Others say the airport must have a connection to Nazis since the runways form a perfect swastika (actually they don’t). Even ex-Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura got into the act, interviewing a man claiming that massive tunnels under the airport were built not for luggage handling or mass transit (that’s what they want you to think!), but instead for much more sinister purposes.

The wind swings the old cage door open as if to free a reluctant occupant. But there’s nothing there… Or are those paw prints in the sand? Besides, isn’t that the stale breath of some meat-eating beast hanging in the air? And what’s that rustling sound in the bushes? As we explore the following places, you’ll see that abandoned zoos can be more than a little creepy.

Flying above the U.S. Midwest, scientists using high-speed video cameras have caught the first 3-D images of sprites, elves, blue jets, and crawlers—in the form of lightning, that is. First seen by scientists in 1989, sprites and their menagerie of exotically named kin are bursts of electrical energy that form about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, sometimes leaping all the way from the tops of thunderheads to outer space.

Russian authorities today resorted to ‘devious tricks’ to limit the numbers attending an anti-Vladimir Putin rally which is expected to be the largest ever against the prime minister. Pupils between 14 and 17 have been ordered to attend school tomorrow for hastily arranged tests during the hours of the protest. They were warned they risk flunking their courses if they fail to sit at their desks for unprecedented Saturday exams.

There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely. Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.

The space agency has lost or misplaced more than 500 pieces of the lunar rocks and other space samples, NASA’s inspector general reported Thursday, making the case for better inventory controls. Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide. The space agency now lists 517 moon rock samples as missing or stolen. However, the inspector general audit suggests much more is missing, based on inquiries to a sample of 59 scholars loaned moon rocks, comet dust or meteorites. The audit found 19% could not locate all of their samples.

Customs and Border officials nabbed a 21-year-old Mexican citizen this week on suspicion of smuggling $140,000 worth of methamphetamine in these three cans of liquid nacho cheese and jalapenos, the LA Times reports. Incredibly, this is not the first time nacho cheese has been used as a smuggling tool. In October, a customs officials found 7 pounds of meth hidden in nacho cheese cans, NPR reports.

At the White House press briefing on Monday, reporter Lester Kinsolving of WorldnetDaily noted the 93 to 7 Senate vote for a defense authorization bill that repeals the military’s ban on sodomy and bestiality and asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney whether President Obama, as commander-in-chief, approves or disapproves of bestiality in the armed forces. Carney declined to comment.

Empathy lets us feel another person’s pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether nonhuman animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people.

Only the bravest would tackle a cave whose icy waters have already claimed the lives of several divers. But if there was any doubt about the peril that awaits at Hodge Close Quarry, one need only look at this picture The lake at the abandoned slate quarry is an eerie enough site – but as this image shows if you turn your head you are greeted with the terrifying sight of a giant skull.

But America’s police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It’s just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven’t generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform. Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of “The Simpsons” bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.

➪ Suit filed after NM teen cuffed for burp in class

A 13-year-old was handcuffed and hauled off to a juvenile detention for burping in class, according to a lawsuit filed against an Albuquerque school principal, a teacher and school police officer. The boy was transported without his parents being notified in May after he “burped audibly” in PE class and his teacher called a school resource officer to complain he was disrupting her class. The lawsuit also details a separate Nov. 8 incident when the same student was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched as he was accused of selling pot to another student; the boy was never charged.

It had been 26 years since anyone last laid eyes on well-known wheelchair scuba diver Peter Devoe, who failed to resurface after a 1985 family dive at Cates Park in North Vancouver. Devoe, who was 29 when he disappeared, was finally recovered in the Burrard Inlet by a pair of commercial fishers in October. Coroners said Wednesday they identified his remains by the jewelry he wore and telltale marks on his bones from a car accident. His body was surprisingly well-preserved within his full-body scuba suit, despite floating in the inlet for almost three decades. His remains were found just west of where he vanished during a dive with his brother on March 13, 1985. His body never floated out of the bay, and was anchored down in the calm waters by his weighty equipment, Coroner Stephen Fonseca said.

A supercharged mobility scooter has been seized by Doncaster council officers after being driven at speeds of up to 60mph, scaring wild deer and annoying residents in the area. Converted to be driven by a supercharged 140cc petrol engine, the mobility scooter was described as a ‘feat of engineering’ by Cynthia Ransome, Doncaster council’s communities officer. As well as the engine, it had been ‘pimped’ with go-kart wheels and a large exhaust.

In July 2011, a customer at a Chase Bank branch in West Hills, Calif. noticed something odd about the ATM he was using and reported it to police. Authorities who responded to the incident discovered a sophisticated, professional-grade ATM skimmer that they believe was made with the help of a 3D printer. Below is a front view image of the device. It is an all-in-one skimmer designed to fit over the card acceptance slot and to record the data from the magnetic stripe of any card dipped into the reader. The fraud device is shown sideways in this picture; attached to an actual ATM, it would appear rotated 90 degrees to the right, so that the word “CHASE” is pointing down.

An anti-graffiti campaign is under way in Brooklyn to help business owners keep their buildings clean and keep customers spending money. Some consider the colorful spray-paint graffiti to be street art, but in the bustling business district of Bay Ridge along 3rd, 4th and 5th avenues, it is frowned upon. Dennis Monier has owned Tops Restaurant Supply for 43 years, and he also lives in Bay Ridge, so his neighborhood pride runs deep. He was dismayed on Sunday morning to see graffiti on his building. “It’s not good for the neighborhood, because it makes the neighborhood look dirty,” he said. “We’re trying to keep the neighborhood clean, the sidewalks, the walls, everything. And to have a graffiti-ed neighborhood, people won’t shop here. So you do want this removed.”

Why is cupric sulfate — a known herbicide, fungicide and pesticide — being used in infant formula? And why is it displayed proudly on product labels as a presumably nutritious ingredient? Used to kill fungus, aquatic plants and roots of plants, parasitic infections in aquarium fish and snails, as well as algae and bacteria such as Escherichia coli, cupric sulfate hardly sounds fit for human consumption, much less for infants.

Federal statistics released Thursday revealed that treatment for prescription painkiller abuse has skyrocketed 430% over the last decade. The increase is even more pronounced given that over the same time period the overall rate of substance-abuse-related admissions to rehab facilities has flatlined, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. The rise occurred in every region of the country, but was highest in Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Arkansas, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. Tylenol with codeine, Darvocet, Vicodin and Percocet ranked high on the SAMHSA’s list of most-abused prescription meds. Thanks King Solomon

➪ Man jailed for blasting co-worker’s rectum with air compressor

A CARPENTER’S assistant blasted pressurised air up his friend’s rectum, rupturing his large intestine, because he was seeking a pleasant change that would break the monotony of hard work, a Nicosia court has said. The foreign EU national who is a father of two, was jailed for 45 days last week after admitting that in October last year he had seriously injured his friend who required surgery and a lengthy stay in hospital to recover. “The defendant’s idea to administer pressurised air into his friend’s anus is indeed original and in reality the thought of it provokes laughter; but putting the idea into practice ended up in tragedy for the victim and the perpetrator,” the court said.

The next generation of the Kinect (bundled with future Xbox consoles) may be “so accurate it can lip read,” the Technology Review Hello World headline breathlessly reads — evoking HAL 9000 in 2001. What’s more, says Eurogamer, citing a nameless source, “Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will enable games to detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing, and track the pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to measure different emotional states.” Thanks Ava

Before her tragic passing in 2007, Anna Nicole Smith was well known her outrageous behaviour. But in a bizarre never-seen-before photo shoot, it appears that she took things to a whole other level. New snaps show the late actress and model completely naked and painted in gold. Taken while she was pregnant with her now five-year-old daughter Danielynn, Smith’s modesty is merely covered by her arm and a thick veil of the metallic paint.

Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories. Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

Oscar de la Hoya encouraged model Angelica Marie Cecora to help him do cocaine using a body part other than his nose during an alleged, kinky romp at Manhattan’s Ritz Carlton hotel last March, she told Page Six. Cecora also claimed to us that the ex-boxing champ revealed to her he was molested by a female staffer in high school.

The discovery of a secret drug smuggling passage that stretched about 400 yards and linked warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana has lead to the seizure of an estimated 17 tons of marijuana, in what authorities say is one of the most significant narco-tunnels ever found. U.S. authorities seized about nine tons of marijuana inside a truck and at the warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa area, said Derek Benner, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. Mexican authorities recovered about eight tons south of the border.Authorities spoke at a news conference near packages of seized dope festooned with labels of Captain America, Sprite and Bud Light. The markings are codes to identify the owners.

If addiction is the kind of thing you think about a lot, it’s easy to overlook its significance in the cold, objective Realpolitik scheme of things, which is this: it’s a great fucking business model. From the British East India Company to the Bronfman clan to Duke University, history is redolent of abject mediocrities who owe their billions to Big Addiction.

✦ Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon

A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community

✦ Kansas gov. says staff overreacted to teen’s tweet

When a high school senior tweeted that Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback “sucked,” among other invectives, reaction at the state Capitol led her principal to demand an apology. Instead, it was the Republican governor offering a mea culpa Monday, forced to admit to a self-described overreaction by his staff that subjected him to ridicule for efforts to police a teenager’s Internet musings. Emma Sullivan’s tweet from the back of a crowd listening to Brownback speak last week, and her subsequent refusal to write an apology letter, spurred several thousand supporters to rush to her online defense – boosting her Twitter following from 61 friends to more than 12,000 people in less than a week.

Most Americans still believe that our weather patterns are 100% natural and that our government has absolutely no control over the weather. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. What you are about to read is evidence that weather modification is happening right now all over the United States. This is never acknowledged by our politicians and it is never talked about by the mainstream media. But it is very, very real. Weather modification programs in some parts of the country have been going on for many years and evidence of these programs is hidden in plain view. So does this mean that if we don’t like the weather we can just blame the government? Well, yes it does, but it also means that the government has been seriously messing around with our environment and there could be “unintended consequences” that are far more dramatic than any of us ever dared to imagine.

The Minescape project by Los Angeles-based photographer Brett Van Ort looks at the ironic effects of landmines on the preservation of natural landscapes, placing woods, meadows, and even remote country roads off-limits, fatally tainted terrains given back to animals and vegetation.

After the EU’s announcement that it will ban “backscatter” x-ray body scanners, airports may have to look harder at alternative security measures. From Bluetooth tracking to thermal lie-detector cameras, we take a glimpse into the weird and wonderful future of airport security.

The heartwarming tale is about Zippy trying to make his way in primary school, navigating the cliques and clacks, trends and fashions, loves and hates that plague many students today. And he had his difficulties; the kind that would trigger medication for children in our overly medicated society. But Zippy had a dream – and atavistic ambition.

Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.

Prosecutors have charged two New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission employees with selling names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers of “unsuspecting residents” for as little as $200 per identity. The same investigation conducted by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Economic Crime Unit in Trenton led to charges against two non-government workers who allegedly used their jobs in a tax office and realty company to sell identities as part of a similar scheme.

There are stories that have come to light, over the years, that make the Central Intelligence Agency look like a collection of Looney Tunes shorts. The violence, the slapstick, and the over-the-top ridiculousness of the experiments that have been conducted over the years boggle the mind. They came from the (slightly-boggled) mind of one man: Sidney Gottlieb.

Remember the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program with which the federal government came to the rescue of faltering banks in 2008? Well, according to a Bloomberg report, that was just a fraction of the financial help the Federal Reserve Bank wound up doling out to troubled lenders. The real total was reportedly closer to $8 trillion, after you add up benefits outside TARP, including emergency loans given at below-market rates

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office says it has charged 89 men in the borough’s haredi Orthodox communities with child sex abuse — a threefold increase over a two-year span. However, the Forward reported that Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes declined to provide any details about the cases, making the number of arrests impossible to verify. His spokesman, Jerry Schmetterer, gave the figures to the newspaper in mid-November. The numbers reflect the number of haredi Orthodox men charged with sexual abuse since October 2009.

US authorities have initiated the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. With just a few days to go until “Cyber Monday” more than 100 domain names have been taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The seizures are disputable, as the SOPA bill which aims to specifically legitimize such actions is still pending in Congress.

Male nursery web spiders (Pisaura mirabilis) prepare silk-wrapped gifts to give to potential mates. Most gifts contain insects, but some gifts are inedible plant seeds or empty exoskeletons left after the prey has already been eaten (presumably by the male himself!). Males will also ‘play dead’ if a female moves away and then attempt to re-establish mating. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology examines the reproductive success of deceitful males and shows that females are not impressed by worthless gifts.

In the months following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, a charity run by hip-hop star Wyclef Jean spent a pittance of the money it took in on disaster relief and doled out millions in questionable contracts. Yele Haiti’s coffers swelled to $16 million in 2010, the most the charity had ever received. But less than a third of that went to emergency efforts, and $1 million was paid to a Florida firm that doesn’t seem to exist, The Post has learned.

The target of the USA cruelty is not limited with humans. In the latest leaked footage, it is seen how the terrorist USA soldiers had great satisfaction by beating and killing a captured innocent sheep with a baseball bat. And the other USA soldiers there had fun by laughing with disgusting laughters and yellings. According to news agencies and the source data, this footage was recorded in Afghanistan on the first day of Eid al-Adha (06 Nov 2011).

Tattoo artist Ryan Fitzgerald from Dayton, OH was hit with a $100,000 lawsuit last week by his ex-girlfriend Rossie Brovent. She claims that her boyfriend was supposed to tattoo a scene from Narnia on her back but instead tattooed an image of a pile of excrement with flies buzzing around it.

Mutant pointy cowboy boots _ part Aladdin, part Las Vegas _ created a fashion craze that spread from one northeastern Mexican town.

Does this man look drunk to you?I mean, could someone who spends a lot of time sober ever possibly consider a facial tattoo like that?

This is 29-year-old Cory P. Smits, who was recently given his fifth operating while intoxicated conviction.

He’s racking these things up like body art.

Smits was arrested in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, back in February when police pulled him over for swerving and found a man with glassy and bloodshot eyes.

I’m surprised they even noticed the eyes.

✪ Boater finds brick of likely cocaine, snorts some, dies

A Merritt Island videographer died in a Miami hospital Thursday after he snorted an unknown substance — possibly cocaine — from a brick he found floating off the Middle Keys, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office says.Thomas Swindal, 53, and his brother Kenneth were trolling in about 200 feet of water on Wednesday when, Detective Mark Maison said, they found what they believed to be a kilo of cocaine and brought it aboard the boat, tossing it into the bait well.

They kept on fishing and, Kenneth Swindal told detectives, he looked back a short time later and saw his brother open the package and ingest some of its contents.

He said about an hour and a half later, Thomas Swindal began to run around the boat, throw things in the water and even gaffed the engine, which fell off the boat and sank.

He continued acting strangely, running around with knives and pliers, so Kenneth Swindal threw all the sharp objects, as well as the package, off the boat.

The 29-year-old man, identified as Gerardo Martinez, answered the door shirtless with his pants down, the police report said. Officers asked him to pull his pants up and asked him about the cat.Martinez, who admitted to using meth, first denied having a cat, police said. Later, he changed his story and told police his boyfriend threw the cat from the window three hours prior, police said.

When police told Martinez that witnesses said the cat was thrown more recently, he said he attempted to have sex with the cat and then threw it out the window, along with a pornographic DVD, police said.

The recording was allegedly made at the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas, owned by the FLDS. It begins with Jeffs asking the girl how she feels.According to the transcript made and given to the court, the girl replies: ‘Feels good.’

Soon after Jeffs can be heard saying: ‘Everyone else let go of me, back away a little. Please get on the other side of the bed.

‘You shall learn the powers of the spirit of God as a heavenly wife should,’ Jeffs tells the 12-year-old.

‘Let the heavenly comfort hear us.

‘We bless you, by the Lord, at this young age. To come to know God and his power, and feel his presence.’

According to CNN, many jurors lowered their heads and closed their eyes during the recording.

The voice is also heard saying: ‘You have to know how to be sexually excited and to help each other … and you have to be ready for the time I need your comfort.

ATTENTION IDIOTS IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA – Stop The Budget Lies – There Are NO Cuts – House Passes Bill To INCREASE Spending By $7 Trillion Over The Next 10 Years

Leona Baldwin’s husband saw it first, and she got on the marine radio to alert others in the remote Alaska village of Kivalina that a strange orange goo was sitting on top of the town’s harbor.The news attracted all the townspeople, anxious to get a gander of the phenomenon that covered much of the harbor and then began washing ashore Wednesday.

The next day it rained, and residents found the orange matter floating on top of the rain buckets they use to collect drinking water. It was also found on one roof, leading them to believe whatever it was, it was airborne, too.

By Friday, the orange substance in the lagoon had dissipated or washed out to sea, and what was left on ground had dried to a powdery substance.

Samples of the orange matter were collected in canning jars and sent to a lab in Anchorage for analysis.

Until results are known, Kivalina’s 374 residents will likely continue to wonder just what exactly happened in their village.

“Hey, don’t look at us” has been Entergy Corporation’s response to the discovery of Strontium-90 in fish from the Connecticut River.But the contamination, revealed this week by the Vermont Department of Health, promises to complicate the utility’s effort to extend the license of its aging Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant.

“They came in Target, they were throwing chairs, everybody went running,” said witness Shauny Bowe.“Everybody was just running everywhere,” said Bowe. “They went to McDonald’s, and they told people to get out, cussing and swearing. They were about to taze people. I was scared for my life.”

As members of the church cleaned up the park, they said they are saddened that a day of fun and worship is now associated with disruption and vandalism.

Twenty-six police officers hurt in clashes, with eight being treated in hospital Scotland Yard still dealing with ‘isolated pockets of crime’ this morning Mob of 500 people protest about death of father-of-four Mark Duggan who was shot by officers 100 riot police on the streets as Tottenham burns Fears that violence was fanned by Twitter as picture of burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times Shop looted and youths storm McDonald’s and start cooking their own food Mail on Sunday photographers beaten and mugged by masked thugs

Amid heavy downpours, a mother and daughter suspected of shoplifting at a Charlotte coat store ran into a swollen, fast-moving stream Friday night. Police found the mother’s body at the bottom of the creek Friday, and now it is being reported that search crews have found the body of her 16-year-old daughter Saturday.

$6500 Buy It Now

Clusters of young men hurled bricks and aimed fireworks at riot police officers before a backdrop of burning cars and buildings early Sunday in north London as a protest turned into an all-out riot.Demonstrators on Saturday evening marched to a police station in the Tottenham area of London to protest the death of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of four who was killed Thursday by officers from the Trident unit of the Metropolitan Police, which investigates gun crime, according to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, an external government body which regulates the police.

By 10:20 p.m. local time, the protest had turned violent. Two empty police cars were burned and officers were “subject to bottles and other missiles being thrown at them by the crowd,” according to a statement released by the police.

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

The main obstacle to progress “seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination,” Etzioni writes in the piece, which he acknowledges “is meant to be provocative.”

A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests.

The latest development has to with Facebook’s facial recognition feature that helps users tag photos. After joining in the chorus of European nations that objected to the feature launch in June, German authorities are now the first to declare the feature illegal. Hamburg’s data protection official Johannes Caspar claims that the software violates both German and European Union data protection laws and that Facebook users don’t know how to delete the data that Facebook is gathering. “If the data were to get into the wrong hands, then someone with a picture taken on a mobile phone could use biometrics to compare the pictures and make an identification,” Caspar told the Hamburger Abendblatt. “The right to anonymity is in danger.”

✪ Lego Minifigs Soon Headed for Deep Space

The figures, milled from aluminum, will accompany Juno on its five-year trip to Jupiter. When Juno arrives in 2016, the Lego likeness of the Roman god, Jupiter, his sister, Juno, and the Italian astronomer, Galileo, will be there to take in all the sights and bask in the immensity of the largest planet.This (until now) secret installation was initiated by NASA scientists, who love Lego as much as anyone and wanted to do something memorable for this mission. They approached Lego and the company loved the idea. It saw the project as a way to promote children’s education and STEM programs.

The brick company even underwrote the project, at a cost of $5,000 for each of the minifigs, which will soon become the farthest flying toys ever. The manufacture of the figures was a deliberate process to ensure the figures would not interfere with NASA’s sensitive measurements.

A U.S. federal court has ruled that the domain seizure of sports streaming site Rojadirecta does not violate the First Amendment, and has refused to hand the domain back to its Spanish owner. The order stands in conflict with previous Supreme Court rulings and doesn’t deliver much hope to other website owners who operate under U.S. controlled domain names.

pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one’s real identity.I can understand why Google and Facebook don’t want this to happen. It’s bad for their marketing teams. It generates social problems when people don’t act responsibly under the cloak of their assumed identity. It messes up the clarity and coherence of their data. And maybe those costs do outweigh the benefits pseudonymity brings to social networks.

But then let’s have that conversation. Let’s not pretend that what Google and Facebook are doing has long-established precedents and therefore these companies are only doing what they’re doing to mimic real life. They are creating tighter links between people’s behavior and their identities than has previously existed in the modern world.

IF YOUR face and name are anywhere on the web, you may be recognised whenever you walk the streets—not just by cops but by any geek with a computer. That seems to be the conclusion from some new research on the limits of privacy.For suspected miscreants, and people chasing them, face-recognition technology is old hat. Brazil, preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2014, is already trying out pairs of glasses with mini-cameras attached; policemen wearing them could snap images of faces, easy to compare with databases of criminals. More authoritarian states love such methods: photos are taken at checkpoints, and images checked against recent participants in protests.

The two assassins arrived from nowhere as their victim was driving home with his wife. Trapped inside his car, he was hopelessly vulnerable as their motorcycles pulled alongside.He would just have had time to notice their blacked-out visors before they opened fire, emptying round after round into his chest.

Nuclear scientist Darioush Rezaei died immediately. His wife was critically wounded and still in hospital days after the attack in north eastern Iran.

The hitmen? They vanished into the traffic fumes of the night.

Believe it or not, one in seven Americans – 15 percent of the country – now need government-provided food stamps simply to survive, according to latest government figures.Nearly 46 million Americans receive food stamps out of a population of some 311 million people, the US Department of Agriculture, which administers what’s officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme reported Thursday.

A comedian who threw a foam pie into the face of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was jailed for six weeks yesterday.Jonathan May-Bowles, 26, attacked the 80-year-old chief executive and chairman of News Corporation as he gave evidence to MPs about the hacking scandal that has engulfed his company, calling him a ‘naughty billionaire’.

May-Bowles – also known as Jonnie Marbles – from Windsor, Berkshire, was ordered to pay £250 costs at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, and a £15 victim surcharge.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has plummeted by 760 points since the terms of the debt ceiling deal were announced Monday. If austerity was supposed to encourage economic growth, someone forgot to tell Wall Street.On Thursday alone, the index dropped more than 500 points, the worst one-day drop since the lowest lows of the meltdown.

Some budget-cutting enthusiasts promoted the “important economic advantages of linking the debt limit to spending reductions,” and we’re seeing the immediate aftermath.

Before the deal was voted on, Paul Krugman warned, “The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending since that will depress the economy even further.”

Investors seem to agree and, for the moment anyway, have decided to get out of Dodge.

When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they’re cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as the rest of us?Should you have, this morning, been unreasonably detained by aggressive machines, may I tell you that Google’s famed, futuristic, liberating, and ultimately superhuman machine, the self-driving Prius, was involved in a fender bender.

What seems evident from shots of the scene is that Google’s robot machine ran into the back of another Prius. You might think that it was on robotic autopilot and this was some sort of mating ritual.

You might also think that a Google representative rushing to the defense of our future controllers by issuing a statement to Business Insider that a human had been driving might smack of the convenience of being chauffeur-driven.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Pentagon sank tens of millions of dollars into remote-controlled lightning guns that it hoped would fry insurgent bombs before they killed any more troops. Now, disassembled parts from the one-time wonder-weapons are being sold on eBay. At least one buyer snatched up the gear, hoping to use it in his latest art project for Burning Man.All of which would make for a funny little story, if that buyer didn’t discover that the multimillion dollar “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizers,” or JINs, were kluged together from third-rate commercial electronics, and controlled by open Wi-Fi signals. In other words, the Pentagon didn’t just overpay for a flawed weapon. On the off-chance the JIN ever worked, the insurgents could control it, too.

“This is the hack of all hacks,” says Cody Oliver, a freelance technologist in San Francisco. “And this is what they were selling to the government? Holy shit.”

It is hard to get a fix on how much porn contributes to cable and satellite companies’ bottom lines because the companies aren’t transparent about it. But adult content has been a consistent source of profit, because cable operators have leverage to command margins that can exceed 90% on rentals of generally interchangeable porn movies, analysts say. “It’s a relevant business simply because of its profitability,” said Craig Moffett, a cable and satellite analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.Adult movies are often more expensive, too. Many adult movies cost $9.98 to rent on Time Warner Cable in New York, while Hollywood films often cost $4.99 to rent.

The porn-cable connection tumbled into public view when NBC’s “30 Rock” mocked the dependence of Kabletown—a fictionalized version of NBC’s then soon-to-be owner Comcast—on pay-per-view pornography, calling it “the goose that lays the golden eggs.

A drunk New Zealand passenger urinated in the aisle of a Jetstar aircraft – spraying one man and soaking a woman’s scarf – but was allowed to leave the flight with only a warning.The man, travelling from Auckland to Singapore two days ago, emptied his bladder about six hours into the 11-hour flight.

Passenger Amos Chapple said: “I hear this sound of running water and then I hear a guy going ‘No, no, no, what the hell is wrong with you?’

“And there’s this guy pissing in the aisle, waving back and forth.”

The man urinated on to the aircraft carpet, a man’s leg, and a woman’s scarf.

The family of a coldblooded killer serving 25 years to life in state prison for shooting a man in the head complains he’s being stigmatized — by the use of the term “inmate.”The label “implies that our brother is locked up for the purpose of mating with other men,” claims Marie Domond in a lawsuit against the state Correctional Services Department.

It apparently hurts his feelings. Sis seeks $50 million damages for “mental anguish.”

A father posted a chilling message on Facebook saying ’bout 2 kill ma’ kid’ before stabbing his daughter to death to spite her mother.Ramazan Acar, 24, murdered two-year-old Yazmina in an attack the judge said was caused by ‘revenge and spite’ and in the worst categories of murders.

Sentencing him to 33 years in prison, Justice Elizabeth Curtain said Acar had breached a parent’s most fundamental duty when he killed his daughter in a ‘chilling and horrific’ attack.

How a lonely, five-foot-two, gender-questioning soldier became a WikiLeaks hero, a traitor to the U.S., and one of the most unusual revolutionaries in American history.

Can you begin to see the conflicts of interest here? An organisation charged with promoting nuclear power around the world also controls nuclear safety and health standards. It’s like expecting a tobacco company to prevent lung cancer.And it gets worse. The IAEA holds a veto over World Health Organization (WHO) programs related to radiation and nuclear power. This has undermined WHO’s ability to respond properly to disasters like the one at Fukushima. The IAEA has vetoed WHO conferences on radiation and health. Independent research has been under-funded and critical scientists ostracized.

Through the dominance of the IAEA and the nuclear industry, the health effects of radiation have been misrepresented and underestimated. As a result, the WHO is unable to provide independent advice and assessments of nuclear accidents in order to protect people at risk.

In the first academic study of its kind, Trevor Pinch, Cornell University professor of sociology and of science and technology studies, independently surveyed 166 of Amazon’s top 1,000 reviewers, examining everything from demographics to motives. What he discovered was 85 percent of those surveyed had been approached with free merchandise from authors, agents or publishers.Pinch, who also found the median age range of the reviewers he surveyed was 51 to 60, a surprise said Pinch, because the image of the internet is more of a young person’s thing. Amazon is encouraging reviewers to receive free products through Amazon Vine, an invitation-only program in which the top 1,000 reviewers are offered a catalog of free products to review.

A start-up called SceneTap is rolling out a new service next month for bars and the patrons who love them: facial detection cameras that will keep track of the number of people in a bar, including a running tally of ladies and gents. Smartphone users will be able to download an app to “tap the bar scene” before deciding where to go, so they can steer clear of (or find) the crowds (of the gender they prefer). Two hundred bars across the country have signed on, with over 50 bars in SceneTap’s home base of Chicago agreeing to be tapped.Cameras are set up at the bar’s exits and entrances, says SceneTap CEO Cole Harper. The facial recognition software, built on baseline code from Intel, is not savvy enough to, say, be linked up with Facebook and detect identity; it’s just able to detect a face and its gender. The company is wary of privacy issues around the cameras; it stresses that the cameras won’t know who you are or keep track of how many beers you drink…

✦ Capcom tries to kill used video game sales with the one-save game

Buying used video games is great for gamers who don’t want to pay full price for the latest hits. You know who doesn’t like used video games? Game publishers. In a very sad twist, Capcom’s fighting back against the second-hand game market with a game that can only support one save file — for life.It’s been confirmed that Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D for the Nintendo 3DS is a game that once finished, cannot be reset for complete replay. According to both the U.S. and U.K. game’s instruction manual “saved data on this software cannot be reset.”

Basically what Capcom has done is make Mercenaries 3D a one-time play affair. Once you’ve unlocked all the goodies and played the entire game, you will not be able to erase the game’s save data and start fresh as if it were a new copy. Consider this: lending Mercenaries 3D to a friend, a little brother or sister will be worthless because they’ll only be able to continue playing the game with your saved settings and create their own.

Admitting that “some will call me a torturer” is a surefire way to cut yourself off from anyone’s sympathy. But Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative, isn’t sure whether he’s the hero or the villain of his own story.Distilled, that story, told in Carle’s new memoir The Interrogator, is this: In the months after 9/11, the CIA kidnaps a suspected senior member of al-Qaida and takes him to a Mideast country for interrogation. It assigns Carle — like nearly all his colleagues then, an inexperienced interrogator — to pry information out of him. Uneasy with the CIA’s new, relaxed rules for questioning, which allow him to torture, Carle instead tries to build a rapport with the man he calls CAPTUS.

But CAPTUS doesn’t divulge the al-Qaida plans the CIA suspects him of knowing. So the agency sends him to “Hotel California” — an unacknowledged prison, beyond the reach of the Red Cross or international law.

The tremendous inequality in income, wealth, power and opportunity which is distorting and destroying our nation all flow from the inequalities enabled by bribery and tax avoidance. The only way to fix the nation is to eliminate bribery (campaign contributions and lobbying) entirely, and eliminate tax avoidance entirely by eliminating all deductions, exemptions, loopholes, etc. State total income from all sources everywhere on the planet, calculate tax, done.When you think about how tiny $14 billion is compared to the $3.8 trillion Federal budget and the $14.5 trillion U.S. economy, it makes you want to weep; how cheaply we have sold our government, and how much we suffer under the whip of those who bought it for a pittance.

A High Court judge in Belfast has ordered a teenage boy charged with a series of robberies to surrender his Xbox games console as part of the conditions of him being freed on bail.The 13-year-old boy, who cannot be identified because of his age, was accused of a number of burglaries in the Downpatrick area of Co Down and applied to be released on bail.

When the judge asked the boy what it was he owned that meant a lot to him the teenager said it was his games system.

The judge then ordered him to give the Xbox to the authorities, saying it would be returned to him when the charges were disposed of.

The judge told the youth it would show him what it was like to have something he valued taken from him.

Nine days after he was reported missing as a probable runaway, searchers located 12-year-old Josh Miller of Pike County’s Oatsville community Saturday afternoon.The boy was discovered hiding underneath his family’s home across the road from Knight’s Chapel Church which searchers had often used as a staging area.

A Battle Creek man convicted of having sex with a sheep five years ago was arrested early Friday and charged with breaking into an Emmett Township stockyard.

Marijuana that was to be used as evidence in a Long Island drug case has disappeared from a truck that was transporting it to a Pennsylvania crime lab.Marc Gann, head of a committee examining problems at the Nassau County police crime lab, said it appears someone had tampered with and potentially stolen some of the evidence that was placed FedEx’s custody.

He said the district attorney’s office told him a shipping box on the FedEx truck had been opened, the marijuana removed and the box resealed.

“[The doctors] said, ‘Yeah, right. There’s no moth in there.’ But when they looked, sure enough, there was a moth,” Kathy Schlote said.The doctors said they have seen cockroaches and spiders crawl into people’s ear canals before, but never a moth. Come to find out, moths are stubborn.

“The doctors tried numbing my ear, thinking it would help with the pain and kill the moth. That didn’t work. Then they tried drowning it. That didn’t work. Then they tried irrigating it. That didn’t work. Finally, the doctor pulled it out with tweezers and when they did it was still alive and started flying around,” Wade said.

Police in Brandenburg who discovered a large plot of cannabis called on the neighbouring house only to find an 84-year-old woman who had been feeding her rabbits with the plants.

“The films and videos were in one place, the Tijuana bibles in another, original art in another, and newspapers and magazines in another,” he said.

But in 2003, the building was sold and he was forced to move “160,000 pounds of books” with little notice. It all ended up jammed into a $5,000-a-month, 1,400-square-foot Flatbush storage facility, where it remains today.

“It looks like the warehouse from the last scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,'” he said, adding that it puts a serious damper on his business.

“So many things are inaccessible,” he said. “If somebody said, ‘I absolutely have to have an item,’ it might take me three months to find it.”

In recent years, Scheiner has turned his interest to Orthodox Judaism and spends his days poring over the Torah and the Talmud.

In all, Scheiner estimates he has spent $1 million over the years on the collection. “But that is over a 30-year period, so actually it’s like $30,000 a year,” he said. “That isn’t a whole lot.”

There’s even a name for it: Autodecorating. And Gawker’s calling out the worst offenders: Along with Lindsay and Paris, Kanye West, Padma Lakshmi and Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Kim Zolciak are guilty of filling their houses with paintings, photos and — most notoriously — pillows with their likenesses. Now, I kind of understand celebrities’ motivation here: These are people who are accustomed to seeing their faces on billboards and in magazines. They’re desensitized to it. Right? Or maybe because they make their living off of their faces they’re just excited to pay tribute to their moneymaker. In any case, it’s hardly surprising.

He estimated that about 35 pounds of vomit was in the package discovered June 5 and stated that a similar package was left in the same spot the week before.

Headless male flies engineered to get horny in the heat: Studying mating behavior, even in an organism as simple as a fruit fly, can be challenging, since it depends on a complex set of interactions between two individuals that may not share the researchers’ interest in seeing mating take place. So, some researchers (including one I went to grad school with) decided to take a shortcut. They engineered flies so that male-specific neurons would express a construct that activated the neurons when they were shifted to higher temperatures. It worked, perhaps a bit too well: “Almost all steps of courtship, from courtship song to ejaculation, can be induced at very high levels through [its] activation in solitary males.” In other words, heat the male flies up, and they’ll just ejaculate, even if they’re on their own (although they’ll do a mating dance for nobody first). In fact, it even worked if the males’ heads were chopped off, driven by the activity in their nerve cord.

Well, what would you do if your carefully composed presentation was replaced on the big screen by images of a naked woman? My guess is that you wouldn’t know where to put your laser pointer..

For millennia, philosophers have debated whether or not the self exists solely in the mind, the body, or both. Well, it’s unclear whether this will help clear things up or just muddy the waters further, but Swedish neuroscientists are now claiming that the human brain can add outside objects such as a third arm to one’s physical sense of self, and that people can even mentally project their “self” out of their own body and into someone else’s. If these findings hold up, the implications for virtual reality, robotics and prostheses could be substantial.

The US government filed more than twice as many demands for data about Google users than any other other country in the past six months, according to figures the search behemoth supplied Monday.

What’s more, according to the Google Transparency Report, Google fully or partially complied with the US demands in 94 percent of the cases, a rate that was higher than responses to any other government.

“With smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops, we carry around with us an unprecedented amount of sensitive personal information,” said EFF Staff Attorney Hanni Fakhoury. “That smart phone in your pocket right now could contain email from your doctor or your kid’s teacher, not to mention detailed contact information for all of your friends and family members. Your laptop probably holds even more data — your Internet browsing history, family photo albums, and maybe even things like an electronic copy of your taxes or your employment agreement. This is sensitive data that’s worth protecting from prying eyes.”

Circumcision, Winky D told Zimbabwe’s Nehanda radio, is “one of the coolest moves you will ever make. I should know … I made that move. Takaipa!” Takaipa is the name of a popular Winky D song. “That is why I am asking you to think about getting circumcised this school holiday.” He supposedly added, in a statement that sounds suspiciously like it was written by a government publicist rather than, say, a young dancehall star, “Being cool is not just about having a string of hit songs. It is about taking care of yourself and looking after your health. It is about making sure you are presentable, smart and clean all the time.” His hit “Musarova Bigman” was recently nominated for song of the year at Zimbabwe’s annual National Arts Merit Awards.

The price of cocaine varies greatly between rich countries

EVERY year the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime publishes a report with lots of fascinating data on the production and consumption of illegal drugs around the world. This year’s report highlights a few interesting trends: despite all the effort put into the war on drugs, the street price of cocaine in Europe has dropped relentlessly over the past two decades (even adjusting for inflation and impurity). This may explain why Europe is now almost as big a market for cocaine producers as America. The numbers we have picked out below show the variations in price between a selection of different countries, as well as consumption per person in those places.

1. File this one under “Now It All Makes Sense”. A Missouri farming and ranching contact just got off a conference call wherein he was informed that the federal government is sending out letters to all of the flooded out farmers in the Missouri River flood plain and bottoms notifying them that the Army Corps of Engineers will offer to BUY THEIR LAND.

Intentionally flood massive acreage of highly productive farmground. Destroy people’s communities and homes. Catch them while they are desperate and afraid and then swoop in and buy the ground cheap. Those evil sons of bitches.

2. Speaking of evil sons of bitches, George Soros appears to be “investing” in farmground through the same puppet company that he used to get into the grain elevator and fertilizer business. The company is called Ospraie Capital Management and is buying up farmground in a joint venture with Teays River Investments as a partner.

What do you do if you have fake goods and you need to destroy them so they don’t get to market? Or you have computer storage media and you want to render it completely unreadable? If you’ve got just one hard drive to destroy, you can take it out back and smash it with a sledgehammer. But if you have lots to get rid of, here’s your solution.

Did you know that today scientists are actually producing mice that tweet like birds, cats that glow in the dark, “monster salmon”, “spider goats”, cow/human hybrids, pig/human hybrids and even mouse/human hybrids? The very definition of life on earth is changing right before our eyes. Many scientists believe that genetic modification holds the key to feeding the entire planet and healing all of our diseases, but others are warning that genetic modification could literally transform our environment into a desolate wasteland and cause our world to resemble a really bad science fiction movie. For decades, scientists around the globe have been fooling around with DNA and have been transplanting genes from one species to another. But now technology has advanced so dramatically that just about the only thing limiting scientists are their imaginations.

While global markets for cocaine, heroin and cannabis have declined or remained stable, the production and abuse of prescription opioid drugs and new synthetic drugs have risen, according to the World Drug Report 2011. Illicit cultivation of opium poppy and coca bush have remained limited to a few countries. Although there has been a sharp decline in opium production and a modest reduction in coca bush cultivation, the overall level of manufacture of heroin and cocaine has remained significant.

Welcome to “First Blood,” the inaugural event of the Urban Wrestling Federation — an experimental hybrid league formed earlier this year — held the Friday before last at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. One of the UWF’s many taglines: “Hip Hop meets Pro Wrestling the street meets insanity meets mayhem.” (In the last few months, this line has been tweeted by the UWF no fewer than 27 times.)

Wildfire shuts Los Alamos lab, forces evacuations

The anti-nuclear watchdog group Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, however, said the fire appeared to be about 3 1/2 miles from a dumpsite where as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste were stored in fabric tents above ground. The group said the drums were awaiting transport to a low-level radiation dump site in southern New Mexico.

Lab spokesman Steve Sandoval declined to confirm that there were any such drums currently on the property. He acknowledged that low-level waste is at times put in drums and regularly taken from the lab to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in Carlsbad.

A central Ohio woman accused of spraying sheriff’s deputies with breast milk is facing charges including disorderly conduct. The Delaware County sheriff’s office says deputies responded to a call about a domestic dispute early Saturday, and a man told them his wife was drinking at a wedding and hit him before locking herself in a car.

The sheriff says deputies found the woman in a car and tried to talk with her, but she didn’t cooperate. He says when deputies tried to remove her, she said she was a breast-feeding mother, then exposed part of her chest and sprayed them with breast milk.

We read the news today – oh, boy. After 16 years on the lam from the Feds infamous Boston Irish mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger was finally apprehended yesterday in Santa Monica, CA. Thus ends one of the lengthiest and most notorious manhunts in U.S. law enforcement history. Shit, they even fictionalized Whitey on the silver screen (Scorcese’s The Departed) before he was caught. Here at ego trip, however, we’re well aware that Whitey Bulger isn’t the only elusive ghostface iller out there. In fact, there have and still are plenty more.

Chicago Customs Agents Find Pretty Dresses Saturated With Opium

At the Chicago U.S. Customs and Border Protection International Mail Facility, a seemingly innocent imported shipment of pretty dresses may deceive the untrained eye and an X-ray showing no hidden or secret compartments may give the impression that all is well. However, CBP K-9 Martin’s nose, knows otherwise.

On June 9, while working with his CBP handler, Martin a 6-year-old Belgian Malinois alerted to a large box, invoiced as “Traditional Dresses,” coming from Laos. This parcel contained 65 plastic-wrapped brightly colored shawls destined for Minneapolis weighing 11.9 kilograms. Even though the paperwork was in order and CBP X-ray images of the box and contents showed no anomalies, Martin’s nose remained very interested. Upon closer examination using drug field testing procedures, CBP officers found a positive reaction. All 65 decorative 4-foot by two-foot cloth pieces were saturated with the illegal narcotic opium.

Do-It-Yourself Cheap Quick and Dirty Mosquito Trap

The $500 ad that appears on Page 439 of the book was placed by George Somogyi and directed at his daughter, Rianna, a 17-year-old senior, he said.

It depicts his daughter making funny faces and describes her as a “complete waste of valuable space.” The end of the ad refers to a “Yiddish saying” that “loosely translates to ‘Camel patties attract flies. Hummus attracts pita chips. You are the former.’ “

He reported that he had just bought a small amount of what he thought was marijuana. The taste turned him off, so he called police to check it for him, said police Det. Donald Gmitter.

Snowballer.
Thanks Patrick Nybakken.

Root Races are stages in human evolution in the esoteric cosmology of theosophist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as described in her book The Secret Doctrine (1888). These races were said to have existed on now-lost continents. Blavatsky’s model was developed by later theosophists, most notably William Scott-Elliot in The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904). Annie Besant further developed the model in Man: Whence, How and Whither (1913). Both Besant and Scott-Elliot relied on information from Charles Webster Leadbeater obtained by “astral clairvoyance”. Further elaboration was provided by Rudolf Steiner in Atlantis and Lemuria (1913). Subsequent theosophist authors have called the time periods associated with these races, Epochs.

“It turns out there are proteins in seminal fluid, many of which transfer to the female after sex. Some of these proteins are warrior-like — they fight the sperm of rival males. Other proteins are like hypnotists — entering the female’s circulatory system, they may hormonally dampen her interest in sex with other males. Somewhat disturbingly, the more semen a female is exposed to, the more influence the male has over her reproductive tract and her mating behavior. Semen, it seems, has mind control properties.”

In Despommier’s “vertical farm,” vegetables and fruits would be grown hydroponically. There’d be lettuce on one floor, green beans on another, peppers in the penthouse. Hydroponics and a related technology called aeroponics use 70 to 95 percent less water than conventional farming does. Growing crops indoors allows for year-round production and guards against weather-related crop failure. Building vertical farms in the cities where most food is ultimately consumed would conserve fossil fuels needed for transport, curtail spoilage, and allow for the reforestation of land currently devoted to agriculture, thus offsetting carbon emissions and increasing biodiversity.

The scientists have conceived of a “spacetime cloak” which manipulates light and, in essence, conceals whole events from a viewer. The theory is based on censoring the flow of events, which we perceive as a stream of light particles, also called photons, that strike the retina. By exploiting a characteristic of fiber optics, the flow of photons can be slowed, events edited out and stitched back together, say the team from Imperial College London and Salford University, northwestern England.